Jason Compson

"A man named Compson" (11) - this is how the first Yoknapatawpha member of one of Faulkner's best-known families is referred to in the prose section of Act I, where although a recent arrival he becomes the community's unofficial leader: preventing the bandits from being lynched and heading up the committee that rescues the new settlement from a legal difficulty by arranging to call it "Jefferson" (24). In the prose section of Act III, the novel develops his story in a bit more detail: he trades a race horse to Ikkemotubbe "for a square of land" (169), becoming one of the county's largest planters; he also becomes the partner of Ratcliffe in owning the settlement's store (173). This prose section also gives him a first name: Jason (169), and identifies him as the father of "General Compson, the first Jason's son" (187). There are two inconsistencies here that cannot be resolved. Except for the later date of his arrival, Jason I's place as the first Mississippi Compson is the same in the "Appendix Compson" (1946): there, in 1811 Jason arrives in Yoknapatawpha and swaps a racehorse with Ikkemotubbe to acquire his square mile of land. But elsewhere Faulkner identifies other members of the family as the first Compson. In Absalom, Absalom! it is clearly General Compson himself, Jason II, who is the family founder. In The Mansion (1960), published 9 years after Requiem, it is Quentin Compson in 1821 who arrives first, and he acquires the property from the Mahataha (Ikkemotubbe's mother); it is this man, Quentin II, the great-grandfather of the Quentin in The Sound and the Fury (1929), who is General Compson's father everywhere else. (Note how in The Mansion Faulkner has changed the spelling of "Mohataha," as she is named in this novel [17], another reminder of how many inconsistencies he leaves unresolved in his world.)